The Boys of '61 Part 53

"Can you read and write?" I asked.

"A little, sir. I never had any one to show me, but I used to sit down here in the pews and take up the hymn-book, and spell out the words, and one day master Bob set me a copy in writing, and so I have learned a little. I can read the newspapers, sir, and have kept track of the war."

Upon the first battle of Mana.s.sas, the Peninsular campaigns, the blowing up of the Merrimac, the battles of Antietam, Gettysburg, Vicksburg, New Orleans, and Sherman's campaign, he was well informed. He had a brother who was fighting for the Union.

"He is a brave fellow, and I know he won't show the white feather," said he.

We talked upon the prospects of the colored people now that they were free.

"I reckon, sir," said he, "that a good many of 'em will be disappointed. They don't know what freedom is. But they will find that they have got to work, or else they won't get anything to eat. They are poor, ignorant creatures; but I reckon, sir, that after a while, when things get settled, they will learn how to take care of themselves. But I think they are mighty foolish to clear out and leave their old masters, when they can have good situations, and good pay, and little to do. Then, sir, it is kind of ungrateful like, to go away and leave their old masters when the day of calamity comes. I could not do it, sir; besides, I reckon I will be better off to stay here for the present, sir."

I informed him that I was from Ma.s.sachusetts.

"I know something about Ma.s.sachusetts, and I reckon it is a mighty fine State, sir. I have heard you abused, and the people of Boston also. Savannah people said hard things about you: that you were abolitionists, and wanted the negroes to have equal privileges with the white men. My father, when I was in Norfolk, undertook to get to Ma.s.sachusetts, but he was hunted down in the swamps and sold South, away down to Alabama, and that is the last I have heard of him. I have always liked Ma.s.sachusetts. I reckon you are a liberal people up there. I hear you have sent a ship-load of provisions to us poor people."

I gave him information upon the subject, and spoke of Mr. Everett, who made a speech at the meeting in Faneuil Hall.

"Mr. Everett! I reckon I heard him talk about General Washington once here, five or six years ago. He was a mighty fine speaker, sir. The house was crowded."

The sun was setting, and the s.e.xton had other duties. As I left the church, he said: "Come round, sir, some afternoon, and I will take you up to the steeple, so that you can get a sight of the city, and may be you play the organ. I love to hear music, sir."

How strangely this will read fifty years hence! The words slave,-master,-sold,-hunted down, will make this present time seem an impossibility to those who live after us. This s.e.xton-a slave-heard the minister preach of the loosing of the bonds of the oppressed, and of doing unto others as they would be done by, yet he found in his own experience such a Gospel a lie. His bonds were not loosened; and the boys of the Sunday school, the petted sons of Savannah, went out from their aristocratic homes to perpetuate that lie. At last through war came deliverance; and yet there was so much gentleness in the heart of this man, that in the day of calamity which came to his master, when his sons one by one were killed in their endeavors to sustain that lie; when his property disappeared like dew before the morning sun; when his pride was humiliated; when his daughters, who were expectants of immense fortunes, were compelled to do menial service,-this servant, though a free man, could not find it in his heart to leave them, and take the liberty he loved! It may have been an exceptional case; but it shows an interesting feature of Southern life. The words of this s.e.xton of Savannah will adorn the historic page. "I reckon, sir, that it is the Lord's doing, and that it will be a blessing to us in the end."

Society in the South, and especially in Savannah, had undergone a great change. The extremes of social life were very wide apart before the war; they were no nearer the night before Sherman marched into the city; but the morning after there was a convulsion, an upheaval, a shaking up and a settling down of all the discordant elements. The tread of that army of the West, as it moved in solid column through the streets, was like a moral earthquake, overturning aristocratic pride, privilege, and power.

Old houses, with foundations laid deep and strong in the centuries, fortified by wealth, name, and influence, went down beneath the shock. The general disruption of the former relations of master and slave, and forced submission to the Union arms, produced a common level. A reversal of the poles of the earth would hardly have produced a greater physical convulsion than this sudden and unexpected change in the social condition of the people of the city.

On the night before Sherman entered the place there were citizens who could enumerate their wealth by millions; at sunrise the next morning they were worth scarcely a dime. Their property had been in cotton, negroes, houses, land, Confederate bonds and currency, railroad and bank stocks. Government had seized their cotton; the negroes had possession of their lands; their slaves had become freemen; their houses were occupied by troops; Confederate bonds were waste paper; their railroads were destroyed; their banks insolvent. They had not only lost wealth, but they had lost their cause. And there were some who were willing to confess that they had been fighting for a system of iniquity.

One could not ask for more courteous treatment than I received during my stay in Savannah. I am indebted to many ladies and gentlemen of that city for kind invitations to pa.s.s an evening with them. There was no concealment of opinion on either side, but with the utmost good feeling full expression was given to our differing sentiments.

"We went into the war in good faith; we thought we were right; we confidently expected to establish our independence; but we are whipped, and have got to make the best of it," was the frank acknowledgment of several gentlemen.

"I hate you of the North," said a young lady. It came squarely, and the tone indicated a little irritation.

"I am very sorry for it. I can hardly think that you really hate us. You don't hate me individually?"

"O no. You come here as a gentleman. I should indeed be rude and unladylike to say that I hated you; but I mean the Yankees in general. We never can live together in peace again. For one, I hope to leave the country."

"If I were to reside here, you of course would treat me courteously so long as I was a gentleman in my deportment?"

"Certainly; but you are an individual."

"But if two individuals can live peacefully, why not ten,-or a hundred,-a thousand,-all?"

She hesitated a moment; and then, with flashing eyes and flushed countenance, which added charms to her beauty, said, "Well, it is hard-and you will not think any worse of me for saying it-to have your friends killed, your servants all taken away, your lands confiscated; and then know that you have failed,-that you have been whipped. I wish that we had the power to whip you; but we haven't, and must make the best of it. What we are to do I don't know. We have been able to have everything that money could buy, and now we haven't a dollar. I don't care anything about keeping the negroes in slavery; but there is one feeling which we Southerners have that you cannot enter into. My old mamma who nursed me is just like a mother to me; but there is one thing that I never will submit to,-that the negro is our equal. He belongs to an inferior race."

She laid down the argument in the palm of her hand with a great deal of emphasis.

"Your energy, boldness, and candor are admirable. If under defeat and disaster you sat down supinely and folded your hands, there would be little hope of your rising again; but your determination to make the best of it shows that you will adapt yourself readily to the new order of things. There never will be complete equality in society. Political and social equality are separate and distinct. Rowdies and ragam.u.f.fins have natural rights: they may have a right to vote, they may be citizens; but that does not necessarily ent.i.tle them to free entrance into our homes."

The idea was evidently new to the young lady,-and not only to her, but to all in the room. To them the abolition of slavery was the breaking down of all social distinctions. So long as the negro was compelled to enter the parlor as a servant, they could endure his presence; but freedom implied the possibility, they imagined, of his entrance as an equal, ent.i.tled to a place at their firesides and a seat at their tables. The thought was intolerable.

The poor whites of the South are far below the colored people in ability and force of character. They are a cla.s.s from which there is little to hope. Nothing rouses their ambition. Like the Indians, they are content with food for to-day; to-morrow will take care of itself. In the cities they swarm along the sides of buildings on sunny days, and at night crawl into their miserable cabins with little more aspiration than dogs that seek their kennels. Undoubtedly there is far less suffering among the poor of the Southern cities than among the poor of New York, where life is ever a struggle with want. The South has a milder climate, nature requires less labor for production, and the commercial centres are not overcrowded. The poor whites of the South maintain no battle with starvation, but surrender resignedly to poverty. They can exist without much labor, and are too indolent to strive to rise to a higher level of existence. The war has taken their best blood. Only shreds and dregs remain.

"What can be done for the poor whites?"

It is a momentous question for the consideration of philanthropists and statesmen.

They are very ignorant. Their dialect is a mixture of English and African, having words and phrases belonging to neither language; though the patois is not confined to this cla.s.s, but is sometimes heard in sumptuously furnished parlors.

"I suppose that you will not be sorry when the war is over," I remarked to a lady in Savannah.

"No, sir. I reckon the Confederacy is done gone for," was the reply.

It is reported that a North Carolina colonel of cavalry was heard to address his command thus,-"'Tention, battalion. Prepare to gen orto yer critter. Git!"

The order to ride rapidly was, "Dust right smart!"

You hear young ladies say, Paw, for Pa, Maw, for Ma, and then, curiously adding another vowel sound, they say kear for car, thear for there.

The poor whites of the country are called "poor white trash," "crackers," "clay-eaters," "sand-hillers," and "swamp angels," by the educated whites. There is no h.o.m.ogeneity of white society. The planters, as a rule, have quite as much respect for the negroes as for the shiftless whites.

Yet these miserable wretches are exceedingly bitter against the North: it is the bitterness of ignorance,-brutal, cruel, fiendish, produced by caste, by the spirit of slavery. There is more hope, therefore, of the blacks, in the future, than of this degraded cla.s.s. The colored people believe that the people of the North are their friends. Freedom, food, schools, all were given by the Yankees; hence grat.i.tude and confidence on the part of the freedmen; hence, on the part of the poor whites, hatred of the North and cruelty toward the negro. Idleness, not occupation, has been, and is, their normal condition. It is ingrained in their nature to despise work. Indolence is a virtue, laziness no reproach. Thus slavery arrayed society against every law of G.o.d, moral and physical.

The poor whites were in bondage as well as the blacks, and to all appearance will remain so, while the natural buoyancy of the negro makes him rise readily to new exigencies; with freedom he is at once eager to obtain knowledge and acquire landed estates.

The colored people who had taken up lands on the islands under General Sherman's order met for consultation in the Slave Market, at the corner of St. Julian Street and Market Square. I pa.s.sed up the two flights of stairs down which thousands of slaves had been dragged, chained in coffle, and entered a large hall. At the farther end was an elevated platform about eight feet square,-the auctioneer's block. The windows were grated with iron. In an anteroom at the right women had been stripped and exposed to the gaze of brutal men. A colored man was praying when I entered, giving thanks to G.o.d for the freedom of his race, and asking for a blessing on their undertaking. After prayers they broke out into singing. Lieutenant Ketchum of General Saxton's staff, who had been placed in charge of the confiscated lands, was present, to answer their questions.

"I would like to know what t.i.tle we shall have to our lands, or to the improvements we shall make?" was the plain question of a tall black man.

"You will have the faith and honor of the United States," was the reply.

Rev. Mr. French informed them that the government could not give them deeds of the land, but that General Sherman had issued the order, and without doubt President Lincoln would see it was carried out. "Can't you trust the President who gave you your freedom?" he asked.

A stout man, with a yellow complexion, rose in the centre of the house: "I have a house here in the city. I can get a good living here, and I don't want to go to the islands unless I can be a.s.sured of a t.i.tle to the land; and I think that is the feeling of four fifths present."

"That's so!" "Yes, brother!" was responded. There was evidently a reluctance to becoming pioneers in such an enterprise,-to leaving the city unless the guaranty were sure.

Another man rose. "My bredren, I want to raise cotton, and I'm gwine."

It was a short but effective speech. With keen, sharp intellect, he had comprehended the great commercial question of the day. He knew that it would pay to raise cotton on lands which had been held at fabulous prices when the staple was worth but ten or fifteen cents. He was going to improve the opportunity to raise cotton, even if he did not become a holder of the estate.

"I'm gwine ye, brudder!" "So will I!" and there was a general shaking of hands as if that were sealing a contract. Having determined to go, they joined in singing "The Freedmen's Battle-Hymn," sung as a solo and repeated in chorus:-

Listen | See musical notation

FREEDMEN'S BATTLE-HYMN.